The Day the ship knocked Our Bridge Down

The Day the ship knocked Our Bridge Down

There was not much clearance for ships to pass between the lift bridge towers. Inset: Link from the chain that raised and lowered the span. Link measures 13x8x7 inches and weighs 100 lbs

Scriver’s Marina at Court House Point, second site of Cecil County’s court house. Our first court house was at Ordinary Point.

440 lb sturgeon, with victorious anglers: Arch Foster, John Schaefer, and Eddie Taylor, circa 1939

            Up until a July morning in 1942 things had been pretty quiet for most of us in our little town along the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. Pop worked for the Corps of Engineers, my mother was heavy with child (not to be light until late October), and at six years old the most important thing I had to worry about was how often I could hit a telephone pole at fifty feet with stones from our pot-hole dominated lane. But then the spectacular happened. At 11:38 AM, after negotiating the curve near the pump house, the tanker, Franz Klasen, sheered uncontrollably to port and crashed into the south tower of our lift bridge.

            From our farm about a quarter of a mile away, I heard a sort of dull clanking sound coming from town. I looked over towards the sound and saw that the bridge had disappeared. In those days the fields between our farm and the bridge were dotted with saplings, not the tall, dense trees that now block the view. Back then, I could always see the black lift bridge looming in the distance, outlined against the sky. My grandmother came outside and I pointed and yelled. She said, “My word, where’s the bridge?” She then told me “not to fret” but to wait till my father came home.

            When Pop did come home that evening he took me to town to see what happened. He drove down Bohemia Avenue and turned left on the dirt street that ran between the canal and the Hole-in-the-Wall. He stopped the car just before we got to Mallory Toy’s building (now the Shipwatch Inn) and we looked out at all of the wreckage. The big ship was where the bridge used to be and the black steel from the bridge was strewn across its bow. The steel was twisted out of shape, with some of it jutting high out of the water. I was excited and started jumping around in the car. Pop explained that the bridge was constructed between 1924 and 1925, was opened for traffic in 1926, and served our town for only sixteen years.

The bridge excitement had just died down when Uncle Ernest came for a visit and told me about the exciting time he once had in the North Atlantic. “Well now, Moose the Goose,” he began, jostling the ice cubes in his glass, “a while back, after those Delaware Park ponies let me down, I went fishing off the coast of Maine to make some money. Taking with me my best friend, Jack Daniels, I sailed pretty far off shore in my run-about and just started landing some big trout when a tornado blew me far out to sea. After a while, I saw something large floating in the water. When I paddled up to it I saw a sorry-looking, water-soaked guy hanging on for dear life to a log. He must have had a strong will to survive because he clutched the gunwale and flopped aboard before I could help him. His name was Chuck and, after a long pull on my bottle, he explained that his ship, the H.M.S. Bagel, a majestic Jewish steamer, had foundered in the Bermuda Triangle on its way from the Galapagos Islands to England.

“I got the impression that Chuck was some kind of important person because he said that he had written a book called The Origin of the Spacies, a science fiction story I assumed, but to tell you the truth I thought he was some kind of kook, because every so often he would raise his fist and yell, ‘Only the fit will survive.’ Geez, Moose, he was overdosed on salt and sun. Anyway, he blabbed that he was a scientist and had been studying the animals around Ecuador. I couldn’t understand most of the stuff he talked about but I think he believed that all living things, over a long, long period of time, could somehow change into other, different living things. At any rate, I needed somebody to talk to and help with the boat so I kept him aboard. He said that if he survived he would return to England and write more books, which I would never want to read because he admitted that none of them would have any pictures in them.

“But staying afloat wasn’t easy, Moose, because the weather turned really dirty. A vicious, driving storm drove us north, and then we began seeing larger and larger ice chunks in the water. A while later Chuck pointed to a gigantic iceberg off our bow and we both were shivering something awful. Soon after passing the iceberg we saw a deadly sight. A mammoth ship, an ocean liner, was half submerged in the sea, its stern under water and its bow jutting straight up into the sky. The liner looked almost new, and its name on the bow was scraped off except for the last four letters: ‘---anic.’ And, Geez, I’d give anything to know that poor ship’s full name.

“This is the part of my story that I don’t like to tell, because people were screaming and crying something awful. It was about this time that we saw a man bobbing in the water. I reached down and pulled him aboard. The fellow was almost an iceberg himself, so I gave him a hefty shot of Jack Daniels to warm him up.

“And then, luck must have been on our side because a strong current and warm breeze carried us west towards the good old U.S. of A. We sailed into the Chesapeake Bay, passed Scriver’s Marina at Court House Point, and made our way beyond Schaefer’s Wharf to the yacht basin. We arrived just in time to see John Schaefer land a 440 pound sturgeon. The giant fish almost caught John, whom we watched struggle at the line for about an hour. Finally, with the help of Arch Foster and Eddie Taylor, the exhausted sturgeon was hauled aboard John’s boat. Then they hung the fish up for display at Schaefer’s Wharf.

After that excitement we learned more about the little guy we had rescued from that icy water. His name was Al and he sure was an odd looking bird, with an unruly mustache and hair that was fluffed up on the sides of his head. He told us that the first time he ever did anything for fun was to sail on that ill-fated ocean liner, and then he started telling us about himself. Laboring with the English language, he told us that he had come from Germany, and although he had had trouble with math in school, he was relatively sure that he knew some new theories about the universe that no one else did. But he made a funny statement that gave him away. He said, in his stilted English—now, Moose, I think I’ve remembered it right; he said something about an E equaling a square MC. And when he went on about relatives in space and warped time and all, I knew that we had rescued a goofball and, I swear, I almost booted him into the canal.

        “I restrained myself, though, because I’ve always felt sorry for slow learners. And it made me feel good when he told me that he had managed to get a job at an obscure college in New Jersey called Princetown. For all we know, he may be performing his janitorial duties now, even as we speak. And I wish him well because some people say that I’m not that smart myself.” But, dern, I sure thought Uncle Ernest was smart, as well as brave, never mind lucky to have survived such a dangerous adventure.